The present invention relates to a primary composition comprising all essential nutrients of a fruit or a plant material, which has an increased stability, bioavailability and miscibility; and process of forming the same. It also relates to an oral composition that contains the primary composition in a foodstuff, in a food supplement, in a cosmetic preparation or in a pharmaceutical preparation.
Pigments and bioactive compounds extracted from fruits or plant materials are widely used in the food industry as functional ingredients. Among all of them, wolfberry (Lycium barbarum) is one of the most valued functional ingredients in China, especially for its benefits for eyesight, the immune system, and its anti-ageing properties, associated with the multiple bioactive compounds present in the fruit. It is traditionally consumed through hot water extraction.
Many other ingredients are also well perceived by consumers for their beneficial properties, but their applications in food products are either difficult or give poor bioavailability. In fact, fruits are usually rich in reducing sugars, making the drying and handling of their powder very difficult.
A large number of extraction techniques are already known. For example, in WO03020053, a process for extracting carotenoids from carotenoid-containing plant matter is described. It comprises (i) Mixing the plant matter with water to achieve Brix not greater than 10 DEG. (ii) Crushing the mixture from stage (i) and separating the solids from the liquid to obtain two phases, pulp and serum. (iii) Extracting the pulp to obtain carotenoid-containing plant oleoresin. Such a water extraction technique is natural, but is not as efficient as compared to the use of a solvent.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,648,564 describes a process for forming, isolating and purifying xanthophyll crystals by saponification of a xanthophyll diester-containing plant extract in a composition of propylene glycol and aqueous alkali to form xanthophyll crystals. The substantially pure xanthophyll crystals so obtained are suitable for human consumption and can be used as a nutritional supplement and as an additive in food. However, solvent extraction techniques are more difficult to handle, and using solvent can impair the natural image and/or nutritional functions of the product.
Moreover, conventional extraction techniques usually extract a few compounds of the plant or fruit material, leaving some other bioactive compounds in the rest. For example, polysaccharides, polyphenols and other non lipophilic compounds are not extracted together with the lipophilic components such as carotenoids, lipophilic vitamins and other lipids.
For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,409,996 B1 describes a method of obtaining a composition comprising one or more flavonoids by treating a flavonoid containing raw material with an aqueous extraction medium to obtain an extract and separating the flavonoids from said extract by absorption and/or adsorption. Again such extraction method only gives an extract mainly containing a part of bioactive principles of the raw material.
It is thus an object of the present invention to address the above problems by providing a formulation for extracting and delivering the multi-nutrients from a fruit or a plant material with improved stability, miscibility, dispersibility in aqueous systems and enhanced bioavailability of the bioactive compounds. It is also an object to provide a primary composition that can be used directly or easily concentrated or dried into powder for applications in food products, nutritional supplements, cosmetic or pharmaceutical preparations.